May 24, 2010

Alioune Niass, the Sengalese Muslim vendor who first spotted the now
infamous smoking SUV in Times Square and alerted police, is no hero.

If it were not for the Timesof
London, we would not even know of his pivotal role in the story. No
mainstream American newspaper bothered to mention or profile Niass, who
peddles framed photographs of celebs and the Manhattan skyline. None of
the big television stations interviewed him.

As far as the readers of the New York Times are concerned -- not to mention the New York Post and the Daily News
-- Niass doesn’t exist. Nor does he exist for President Obama, who
telephoned Lance Orton and Duane Jackson, two fellow vendors, to thank
them for their alertness in reporting the SUV. The New York Mets even feted Jackson and Orton as heroes at a game with the San Francisco Giants.

And Niass? Well, no presidential phone calls, no encomiums, no articles (though his name did finally surface briefly at a New York Times blog several days after the incident), no free Mets tickets. Yet as the London Times reported, it was Niass who first saw the clouds of smoke seeping from the SUV on that Saturday night.

He hadn’t seen the car drive up, because he was attending to
customers -- and, for a vendor in Times Square, Saturday nights are not
to be taken lightly. Niass was alarmed, however, when he saw that
smoke. “I thought I should call 911,” he told the Times, “but
my English is not very good and I had no credit left on my phone, so I
walked over to Lance, who has the T-shirt stall next to mine, and told
him. He said we shouldn’t call 911. Immediately he alerted a police
officer nearby.” Then the cop called 911.

So Lance got the press, and he and Jackson, who also reported the SUV, have been celebrated as “heroes.” As the Times interview with Niass has made the internet rounds, there have been calls for the recognition of his “heroism,” too.

These three men all acted admirably. The two other vendors did what
any citizen ought to do on spotting a smoldering car illegally parked
on a busy street. But heroes? In the case of Niass, characterizing him
as a hero may in a sense diminish the significance of his act.

A vendor in New York since 9/11, he saw something amiss and reported
it, leading him into contact with the police. That a Muslim immigrant
would not think twice about this simple civic act speaks volumes about
the power of American society and the actual day-to-day lives and
conduct of Muslims in this nation, particularly immigrant Muslims.

This was a reasonably routine act for Orton and Jackson, but for
Niass it required special courage, and the fact that he acted anyway
only underscores what should be an obvious fact about Muslims in
post-9/11 America: they represent a socially responsible and engaged
community like any other.

Assault on American Muslims

Why do I say that his act required courage?

Like many Muslim immigrants in New York City and around the country,
Niass senses that he is viewed with suspicion by fellow citizens -- and
particularly by law enforcement authorities -- simply because of his
religion. In an interview with Democracy Now,
that essential independent radio and television news program, Niass
said that, in terrorism cases, law enforcement authorities view every
Muslim as a potential threat. Ordinary citizens become objects of
suspicion for their very ordinariness. “If one person is bad, they are
going to say everybody for this religion. That is, I think, wrong.”

As far as Niass is concerned, terrorists are, at best, apostates,
irreligious deviants. “That not religion,” he told his interviewer,
“because Islam religion is not terrorist. Because if I know this guy is
Muslim, if I know that, I’m going to catch him before he run away.”

The New York Police Department Intelligence Division, the FBI, and
Immigration and Customs Enforcement all routinely run armies of
informers through the city’s Middle Eastern and South Asian
communities. In the immediate wake of 9/11, sections of New York
experienced sweeps by local and federal agents. The same in
Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, Houston, and communities on the West
Coast -- everywhere, in fact, that Muslims cluster together.

I’ve been reporting on this for years (and have made it the subject of my book Mohamed’s Ghosts: An American Story of Love and Fear in the Homeland).
Despite the demurrals of law enforcement officials, these sweeps and
on-going, ever-widening investigations have focused exclusively on
Muslim enclaves. I have seen the destructive impact on family and
community such covert police activity can have: broken homes, deported
parents, bereft children, suicides, killings, neighbors filled with
mutual suspicions, daily shunning as a fact of life. “Since when is
being Muslim a crime?” one woman whose husband had been swept up off a
street in Philadelphia asked me.

Muslim residents have been detained, jailed, and deported by the
thousands since 9/11. We all know this and law enforcement and federal
officials have repeatedly argued that these measures are necessary in
the new era ushered in by al-Qaeda. A prosecutor once candidly told me
that it made no sense to spend time investigating or watching
non-Muslims. Go to the source, he said.

Radicalization Is a Problem of Limited Proportions

There are many problems with this facile view, and two recent
studies -- one from a think-tank funded in large part by the federal
government, the other from the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke
University and the University of North Carolina’s departments of
religion and sociology (using a U.S. Department of Justice grant) --
highlight some of the most glaring contradictions.

The Rand Corporation studied the incidence of terrorist acts since
September 11, 2001, and found that the problem, while serious, was
wildly overblown. There have been, Rand researchers determined, all of
46 incidents of Americans or long-time U.S. residents being radicalized
and attempting to commit acts of terror (most failing woefully) since
9/11. Those incidents involved a total of 125 people. Think about that
number for a moment: it averages out to about six cases of purported
radicalization and terrorism a year. Faisal Shahzad’s utterly inept
effort in Times Square would make incident 47. In the 1970s, the report
points out, the country endured, on average, around 70 terrorist
incidents a year. From January 1969 to April 1970 alone, the U.S.
somehow managed to survive 4,330 bombings, 43 deaths, and $22 million of property damage.

The Rand report, “Would-Be Warriors: Incidents of Jihadist Terrorist
Radicalization in the United States since September 11, 2001,” argues
that ham-handed surveillance and aggressive police investigations can
be, and often are, counter-productive, sowing a deep-seated fear of law
enforcement and immigration authorities throughout Muslim communities
-- whose assistance is vital in coping with the threat of Islamic
terrorism, tiny as it is here.

Family members, friends, and neighbors are far more likely to know
when someone is headed down a dangerously radical path than the police,
no matter how many informers may be in a neighborhood. “On occasion,
relatives and friends have intervened,” the Rand researchers write.
“But will they trust the authorities enough to notify them when
persuasion does not work?” And will the authorities actually use the
information provided by family members when they receive it? Don’t
forget the perfunctory manner in which CIA officials treated the father of the underwear bomber when he tried to report his son as an imminent threat.

The second study, conducted by a research team from Duke University
and the University of North Carolina, found similarly small numbers of
domestic terror plots and incidents since 9/11. The report identifies
139 Muslim Americans who have been prosecuted for planning or executing
acts of terrorist violence since September 11, 2001, an average of 17 a
year. (Again, most of these attempted acts of terror, as in the Shahzad
case, were ineptly planned, if planned at all.) Like the Rand report,
the Duke-UNC study highlights the meager numbers: “This level of 17
individuals a year is small compared to other violent crime in America
but not insignificant. Homegrown terrorism is a serious but limited
problem.”

The Duke-UNC researchers conducted 120 in-depth interviews with
Muslims in four American cities to gain insight into the problem of
homegrown Islamic terrorism and the response of Muslim Americans to it.
Why so few cases? Why so little radicalization? Not surprisingly, what
the researchers found was widespread hostility to extremist ideologies
and strong Muslim community efforts to quash them -- efforts partially
driven by a desire for self-protection, but more significantly by
moral, ethical, and theological hostility to violent fundamentalist
ideologies.

Both of these reports underscore the importance of what the
researchers call “self-policing” within Muslim communities. They
consider it a critical and underutilized factor in combating terrorism
in the U.S. Far from being secretive breeding grounds for radicalism,
the Duke-UNC report argues, mosques and other Muslim community
institutions build ties to the nation and larger world while working to
root out extremist political fundamentalism. It was not for nothing
that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed instructed his 9/11 hijackers to steer
clear of Muslim Americans, their mosques, and their institutions.

The UNC-Duke report urges federal and local officials to work
aggressively to integrate Muslim communities even more fully into the
American political process. Authorities, it suggests, should be
considering ways of supporting and strengthening those communities by
actively promoting repeated Muslim denunciations of violence. (Such
condemnations have been continuous since 9/11 but are rarely reported
in the press.) Public officials should also work to insure that social
service agencies are active in Muslim neighborhoods, should
aggressively pursue claimed infractions of civil rights laws, and
should focus on establishing working relationships with Muslim groups
when it comes to terrorism and law enforcement issues.

The Times Square incident -- and, yes, the small but vital role
played by Alioune Niass -- illustrate the importance of these
commonsensical recommendations. Yet the media has ignored Niass, and
law-enforcement agencies have once again mounted a highly public,
fear-inducing investigation justified in the media largely by anonymous leaks. This recreates the creepy feeling of what happened in the immediate aftermath of 9/11: the appearance of a massive, chaotic, paranoid probe backed by media speculation disguised as reporting. A warehouse raided
in South Jersey. Why? No answers. A man led away in handcuffs from a
Boston-area home. Who is he? What is his role? Was he a money man?
Maybe. But maybe not. Suspicious packages. Oddly parked trucks. Tips.
Streets closed. Bomb squads cautiously approaching ordinary boxes or
vehicles. No answers -- even after the all-clear rings out and the
yellow caution tape comes down.

More importantly, the controlled flow of anonymous leaks to the
mainstream press has laid the groundwork for the Obama administration
to threaten Pakistan harshly
-- even as Iraq and Afghanistan sink further into deadly and
destructive fighting -- and to ponder extreme revisions of criminal
procedures involving the rights of suspects. The administration’s
radical suggestion to suspend
Miranda rights and delay court hearings for terrorism suspects amounts
to a threat to every American citizen’s right to an attorney and a
defense against state power. Is this the message the country wants to
send “the evil doers,” as President Bush used to call them?

Or have we already taken the message of those evil doers to heart?
Faisal Shahzad, an American citizen taken into custody on American
soil, disappeared into the black hole of interrogation for more than
two weeks -- despite President Obama’s assertion
to a CIA audience over a year ago that “what makes the United States
special... is precisely the fact that we are willing to uphold our
values and our ideals even when it's hard, not just when it's easy,
even when we are afraid and under threat, not just when it's expedient
to do so.”

When the going gets tough, as Attorney General Holder made clear
on “Meet the Press” on May 9th, the tough change the rules. “We’re now
dealing with international terrorists,” he said, “and I think that we
have to think about perhaps modifying the rules that interrogators have
and somehow coming up with something that is flexible and is more
consistent with the threat that we now face.” None of this is good news
for Muslims in America -- or for the rest of us.

[Note to Readers: If you are interested in reading the Duke University-University of North Carolina study, it is available by clicking here, as is the Rand report by clicking here.
(Note that both are PDF files.) Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s aversion to
contact with U.S. Muslims is mentioned in evidence presented at the
trial of Zacarias Moussaoui and can be found in PDF format on page 36
of defense exhibit 941 here. For another view of just how overblown the Islamic terrorist threat in the U.S. is, check out Tom Engelhardt’s “Fear Inc.”]

May 19, 2010

Yes, the oil spewing up from the floor of the Gulf of Mexico in staggering quantities could prove one of the great ecological disasters of human history. Think of it, though, as just the prelude to the Age ofTough Oil,
a time of ever increasing reliance on problematic, hard-to-reach energy
sources. Make no mistake: we’re entering the danger zone. And brace
yourself, the fate of the planet could be at stake.

It may never be possible to pin down the precise cause of the
massive explosion that destroyed the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig on
April 20th, killing 11 of its 126 workers. Possible culprits include a
faulty cement plug in the undersea oil bore and a disabled cutoff
device known as a blow-out preventer.
Inadequate governmental oversight of safety procedures undoubtedly also
contributed to the disaster, which may have been set off bya combination of defective equipment and human error.
But whether or not the immediate trigger of the explosion is ever fully
determined, there can be no mistaking the underlying cause: a
government-backed corporate drive to exploit oil and natural gas
reserves in extreme environments under increasingly hazardous operating
conditions.

The New Oil Rush and Its Dangers

The United States entered the hydrocarbon era with one of the
world’s largest pools of oil and natural gas. The exploitation of
these valuable and versatile commodities has long contributed to the
nation’s wealth and power, as well as to the profitability of giant
energy firms like BP and Exxon. In the process, however, most of our
easily accessible onshore oil and gas reservoirs have been depleted,
leaving only less accessible reserves in offshore areas, Alaska, and
the melting Arctic. To ensure a continued supply of hydrocarbons --
and the continued prosperity of the giant energy companies --
successive administrations have promoted the exploitation of these
extreme energy options with a striking disregard for the resulting
dangers. By their very nature, such efforts involve an ever increasing
risk of human and environmental catastrophe -- something that has been
far too little acknowledged.

The hunt for oil and gas has always entailed a certain amount of
risk. After all, most energy reserves are trapped deep below the
Earth’s surface by overlying rock formations. When punctured by oil
drills, these are likely to erupt in an explosive release of
hydrocarbons, the well-known “gusher” effect. In the swashbuckling
early days of the oil industry, this phenomenon -- familiar to us from
movies like There Will Be Blood -- often caused human and
environmental injury. Over the years, however, the oil companies
became far more adept at anticipating such events and preventing harm
to workers or the surrounding countryside.

Now, in the rush to develop hard-to-reach reserves in Alaska, the
Arctic, and deep-offshore waters, we’re returning to a particularly
dangerous version of those swashbuckling days. As energy companies
encounter fresh and unexpected hazards, their existing technologies --
largely developed in more benign environments -- often prove incapable
of responding adequately to the new challenges. And when disasters
occur, as is increasingly likely, the resulting environmental damage is
sure to prove exponentially more devastating than anything experienced
in the industrial annals of the nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries.

The Deepwater Horizon operation was characteristic of this trend.
BP, the company which leased the rig and was overseeing the drilling
effort, has for some years been in a rush to extract oil from ever
greater depths in the Gulf of Mexico. The well in question, known as
Mississippi Canyon 252, was located in 5,000 feet of water, some 50
miles south of the Louisiana coastline; the well bore itself extended
another 13,000 feet into the earth. At depths this great, all work on
the ocean floor has to be performed by remotely-controlled robotic
devices overseen by technicians on the rig. There was little margin
for error to begin with, and no tolerance for the corner-cutting,
penny-pinching, and lax oversight that appears to have characterized
the Deepwater Horizon operation. Once predictable problems did arise,
it was, of course, impossible to send human troubleshooters one mile
beneath the ocean’s surface to assess the situation and devise a
solution.

Drilling in Alaska and the Arctic poses, if anything, even more
perilous challenges, given the extreme environmental and climatic
conditions to be dealt with. Any drilling rigs deployed offshore in,
say, Alaska’s Beaufort or Chukchi Seas must be hardened to withstand
collisions with floating sea ice, a perennial danger, and capable of
withstanding extreme temperatures and powerful storms. In addition, in
such hard-to-reach locations, BP-style oil spills, whether at sea or on
land, will be even more difficult to deal with than in the Gulf. In
any such situation, an uncontrolled oil flow is likely to prove lethal
to many species, endangered or otherwise, which have little tolerance
for environmental hazards.

The major energy firms insist that they have adopted ironclad
safeguards against such perils, but the disaster in the Gulf has
already made mockery of such claims, as does history. In 2006, for
instance, a poorly-maintained pipeline at a BP facility ruptured,
spewing 267,000 gallons of crude oil over Alaska’s North Slope in an
area frequented by migrating caribou. (Because the spill occurred in
winter, no caribou were present at the time and it was possible to
scoop up the oil from surrounding snow banks; had it occurred in
summer, the risk to the Caribou herds would have been substantial.)

If It’s Oil, It’s Okay

Despite obvious hazards and dangers, as well as inadequate safety
practices, a succession of administrations, including Barack Obama’s,
have backed corporate strategies strongly favoring the exploitation of
oil and gas reservoirs in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico and
other environmentally sensitive areas.

On the government’s side, this outlook was first fully articulated
in the National Energy Policy (NEP) adopted by President George W. Bush
on May 17, 2001. Led by former Halliburton CEO Vice President Dick
Cheney, the framers of the policy warned that the United States was
becoming ever more dependent on imported energy, thereby endangering
national security. They called for increased reliance on domestic
energy sources, especially oil and natural gas. “A primary goal of the
National Energy Policy is to add supply from diverse sources,” the
document declared. “This means domestic oil, gas, and coal.”

As
the NEP made clear, however, the United States was running out of
conventional, easily tapped reservoirs of oil and natural gas located
on land or in shallow coastal waters. “U.S. oil production is expected
to decline over the next two decades, [while] demand for natural gas
will most likely continue to outpace domestic production,” the document
noted. The only solution, it claimed, would be to increase
exploitation of unconventional energy reserves -- oil and gas found in
deep offshore areas of the Gulf of Mexico, the Outer Continental Shelf,
Alaska, and the American Arctic, as well as in complex geological
formations such as shale oil and gas. “Producing oil and gas from
geologically challenging areas while protecting the environment
is important to Americans and to the future of our nation’s energy
security,” the policy affirmed. (The phrase in italics was evidently
added by the White House to counter charges -- painfully accurate, as
it turned out -- that the administration was unmindful of the
environmental consequences of its energy policies.)

First and foremost among the NEP’s recommendations was the
development of the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a proposal
that generated intense media interest and produced widespread
opposition from environmentalists. Equally significant, however, was
its call for increased exploration and drilling in the deep waters of
the Gulf, as well as the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas off northern Alaska.

While drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was, in the
end, blocked by Congress, an oil rush to exploit the other areas
proceeded with little governmental opposition. In fact, as has now
become evident, the government’s deeply corrupted
regulatory arm, the Minerals Management Service (MMS), has for years
facilitated the awarding of leases for exploration and drilling in the
Gulf of Mexico while systematically ignoring
environmental regulations and concerns. Common practice during the
Bush years, this was not altered when Barack Obama took over the
presidency. Indeed, he gave his own stamp of approval to a potentially
massive increase in offshore drilling when on March 30th -- three weeks
before the Deepwater Horizon disaster -- he announced
that vast areas of the Atlantic, the eastern Gulf of Mexico, and
Alaskan waters would be opened to oil and gas drilling for the first
time.

In addition to accelerating the development of the Gulf of Mexico,
while overruling government scientists and other officials who warned
of the dangers, the MMS also approved offshore drilling in the Chukchi
and Beaufort Seas. This happened despite strong opposition from
environmentalists and native peoples who fear a risk to whales and
other endangered species crucial to their way of life. In October, for
example, the MMS gave Shell Oil preliminary approval
to conduct exploratory drilling on two offshore blocks in the Beaufort
Sea. Opponents of the plan have warned that any oil spills produced by
such activities would pose a severe threat to endangered animals, but
these concerns were, as usual, ignored. (On April 30th, 10 days after the Gulf explosion, final approval of the plan was suddenly ordered withheld by President Obama, pending a review of offshore drilling activities.)

A BP Hall of Shame

The major energy firms have their own compelling reasons for a
growing involvement in the exploitation of extreme energy options.
Each year, to prevent the value of their shares from falling, these
companies must replace the oil extracted from their existing reservoirs
with new reserves. Most of the oil and gas basins in their traditional
areas of supply have, however, been depleted, while many promising
fields in the Middle East, Latin America, and the former Soviet Union
are now under the exclusive control of state-owned national oil
companies like Saudi Aramco, Mexico’s Pemex, and Venezuela’s PdVSA.

This leaves the private firms, widely known as international oil
companies (IOCs), with ever fewer areas in which to replenish their
supplies. They are now deeply involved in an ongoing oil rush in
sub-Saharan Africa, where most countries still allow some participation
by IOCs, but there they face dauntingly stiff competition from Chinese
companies and other state-backed companies. The only areas where they
still have a virtually free hand are the Arctic, the Gulf of Mexico,
the North Atlantic, and the North Sea. Not surprisingly, this is where
they are concentrating their efforts, whatever the dangers to us or to
the planet.

Take BP. Originally known as the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later
the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, still later British Petroleum), BP got
its start in southwestern Iran, where it once enjoyed a monopoly on the
production of crude petroleum. In 1951, its Iranian holdings were
nationalized by the democratic government of Mohammed Mossadeq. The
company returned to Iran in 1953, following a U.S.-backed coup that put
the Shah in power, and was finally expelled again in 1979 following the
Islamic Revolution. The company still retains a significant foothold
in oil-rich but unstable Nigeria, a former British colony, and in
Azerbaijan. However, since its takeover of Amoco (once the Standard
Oil Company of Indiana) in 1998, BP has concentrated its energies on
the exploitation of Alaskan reserves and tough-oil locations in the
deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico and off the African coast.

“Operating at the Energy Frontiers” is the title of BP’s Annual Review
for 2009, which proudly began: “BP operates at the frontiers of the
energy industry. From deep beneath the ocean to complex refining
environments, from remote tropical islands to next-generation biofuels
-- a revitalized BP is driving greater efficiency, sustained momentum
and business growth.”

Within this mandate, moreover, the Gulf of Mexico held center
stage. “BP is the leading operator in the Gulf of Mexico,” the review
asserted. “We are the biggest producer, the leading resource holder
and have the largest exploration acreage position… With new
discoveries, successful start-ups, efficient operations, and a strong
portfolio of new projects, we are exceptionally well placed to sustain
our success in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico over the long run.”

Clearly, BP’s top executives believed that a rapid ramp-up in
production in the Gulf was essential to the company’s long-term
financial health (and indeed, only days after the Deepwater Horizon
explosion, the company announced that it had made $6.1 billion
in profits in the first quarter of 2010 alone). To what degree BP’s
corporate culture contributed to the Deepwater Horizon accident has yet
to be determined. There is, however, some indication
that the company was in an unseemly rush to complete the cementing of
the Mississippi Canyon 252 well -- a procedure that would cap it until
the company was ready to undertake commercial extraction of the oil
stored below. It could then have moved the rig, rented from Transocean
Ltd. at $500,000 per day, to another prospective drill site in search
of yet more oil.

While BP may prove to be the principal villain in this case, other
large energy firms -- egged on by the government and state officials --
are engaged in similar reckless drives to extract oil and natural gas
from extreme environmental locations. These companies and their
government backers insist that, with proper precautions, it is safe to
operate in these conditions, but the Deepwater Horizon incident shows
that the more extreme the environment, the more unlikely such
statements will prove accurate.

The Deepwater Horizon explosion, we assuredly will be told, was an
unfortunate fluke: a confluence of improper management and faulty
equipment. With tightened oversight, it will be said, such accidents
can be averted -- and so it will be safe to go back into the deep waters again and drill for oil a mile or more beneath the ocean’s surface.

Don’t believe it. While poor oversight and faulty equipment may
have played a critical role in BP’s catastrophe in the Gulf, the
ultimate source of the disaster is big oil’s compulsive drive to
compensate for the decline in its conventional oil reserves by seeking
supplies in inherently hazardous areas -- risks be damned.

So long as this compulsion prevails, more such disasters will follow. Bet on it.

May 17, 2010

On stage, it would be farce. In Afghanistan and Pakistan, it’s bound to play out as tragedy.

Less than two months ago, Barack Obama flew into
Afghanistan for six hours -- essentially to read the riot act to Afghan
President Hamid Karzai, whom his ambassador had only months before termed “not
an adequate strategic partner.” Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral
Mike Mullen followed within a day to deliver his own “stern message.”

While still on Air Force One, National Security Adviser James Jones
offered reporters a version of the tough talk Obama was bringing with
him. Karzai would later see one of Jones’s comments and find it insulting. Brought to his attention as well would be a newspaper article that quoted
an anonymous senior U.S. military official as saying of his
half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, a reputedly corrupt powerbroker in the
southern city of Kandahar: “I'd like him out of there... But there's
nothing that we can do unless we can link him to the insurgency, then
we can put him on the [target list] and capture and kill him." This
was tough talk indeed.

At the time, the media repeatedly pointed out that President Obama,
unlike his predecessor, had consciously developed a standoffish
relationship with Karzai. Meanwhile, both named and anonymous
officials regularly castigated the Afghan president in the press for
stealing an election and running a hopelessly corrupt, inefficient
government that had little power outside Kabul, the capital. A
previously planned Karzai visit to Washington was soon put on hold to
emphasize the toughness of the new approach.

The administration was clearly intent on fighting a better version
of the Afghan war with a new commander, a new plan of action, and a
well-tamed Afghan president, a client head of state who would finally
accept his lesser place in the greater scheme of things. A little
blunt talk, some necessary threats, and the big stick of American power
and money were sure to do the trick.

Meanwhile,
across the border in Pakistan, the administration was in an all-carrots
mood when it came to the local military and civilian leadership -- billions of dollars
of carrots, in fact. Our top military and civilian officials had all
but taken up residence in Islamabad. By March, for instance, Admiral
Mullen had already visited the country 15 times and U.S. dollars (and promises of more) were flowing in. Meanwhile, U.S. Special Operations Forces were arriving in the country’s wild borderlands to train the Pakistani Frontier Corps and the skies were filling
with CIA-directed unmanned aerial vehicles pounding those same
borderlands, where the Pakistani Taliban, al-Qaeda, and other insurgent
groups involved in the Afghan War were located.

In Pakistan, it was said, a crucial “strategic relationship” was being carefully cultivated. As the New York Timesreported,
“In March, [the Obama administration] held a high-level strategic
dialogue with Pakistan’s government, which officials said went a long
way toward building up trust between the two sides.” Trust indeed.

Skip ahead to mid-May and somehow, like so many stealthy insurgents,
the carrots and sticks had crossed the poorly marked, porous border
between Afghanistan and Pakistan heading in opposite directions. Last
week, Karzai was in Washington being given “the red carpet treatment”
as part of what was termed an Obama administration “charm offensive” and a “four-day love fest.”

The president set aside a rare stretch of hours to entertain Karzai
and the planeload of ministers he brought with him. At a joint news conference,
Obama insisted that “perceived tensions” between the two men had been
“overstated.” Specific orders went out from the White House to curb public criticism of the Afghan president and give him “more public respect” as “the chief U.S. partner in the war effort.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton assured Karzai of Washington’s long-term “commitment” to his country, as did Obama and Afghan War commander General Stanley McChrystal. Praise was the order of the day.

John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, interrupted a financial reform debate to invite Karzai onto the Senate floor
where he was mobbed by senators eager to shake his hand (an honor not
bestowed on a head of state since 1967). He was once again our man in
Kabul. It was a stunning turnaround: a president almost without power
in his own country had somehow tamed the commander-in-chief of the globe’s lone superpower.

Meanwhile, Clinton, who had shepherded
the Afghan president on a walk through a “private enclave” in
Georgetown and hosted a “glittering reception” for him, appeared on
CBS’s “60 Minutes” to flay Pakistan. In the wake of an inept failed
car bombing in Times Square, she had this stern message to send to the
Pakistani leadership: "We want more, we expect more... We've made it
very clear that if, heaven forbid, an attack like this that we can
trace back to Pakistan were to have been successful, there would be
very severe consequences." Such consequences would evidently include a
halt to the flow of U.S. aid to a country in economically disastrous
shape. She also accused at least some Pakistani officials of “practically harboring” Osama bin Laden. So much for the carrots.

According to the Washington Post,
General McChrystal delivered a “similar message” to the chief of staff
of the Pakistani Army. To back up Clinton’s public threats and
McChrystal’s private ones, hordes of anonymous American military and
civilian officials were ready to pepper reporters with leaks about the
tough love that might now be in store for Pakistan. The same Post
story, for instance, spoke of “some officials... weighing in favor of a
far more muscular and unilateral U.S. policy. It would include a
geographically expanded use of drone missile attacks in Pakistan and
pressure for a stronger U.S. military presence there.”

According to similar accounts, “more pointed” messages were heading for key Pakistanis and “new and stiff warnings”
were being issued. Americans were said to be pushing for expanded
Special Operations training programs in the Pakistani tribal areas and
insisting that the Pakistani military launch a major campaign in North
Waziristan, the heartland of various resistance groups including,
possibly, al-Qaeda. “The element of threat”
was now in the air, according to Tariq Fatemi, a former Pakistani
ambassador, while in press reports you could hear rumblings about an
“internal debate” in Washington that might result in more American
“boots on the ground.”

Helpless Escalation

In other words, in the space of two months the Obama administration
had flip-flopped when it came to who exactly was to be pressured and
who reassured. A typically anonymous “former U.S. official who advises
the administration on Afghan policy” caught the moment well in a comment to the Wall Street Journal.
“This whole bending over backwards to show Karzai the red carpet,” he
told journalist Peter Spiegel, “is a result of not having had a
concerted strategy for how to grapple with him."

On a larger scale, the flip-flop seemed to reflect tactical and
strategic incoherence -- and not just in relation to Karzai. To all
appearances, when it comes to the administration's two South Asian
wars, one open, one more hidden, Obama and his top officials are
flailing around. They are evidently trying whatever comes to mind in
much the manner of the oil company BP as it repeatedly fails to cap a
demolished oil well 5,000 feet under the waves in the Gulf of Mexico.
In a sense, when it comes to Washington’s ability to control the
situation, Pakistan and Afghanistan might as well be 5,000 feet
underwater. Like BP, Obama’s officials, military and civilian, seem to
be operating in the dark, using unmanned robotic vehicles. And as in the Gulf, after each new failure, the destruction only spreads.

For all the policy reviews and shuttling officials, the surging troops, extra private contractors, and new bases,
Obama’s wars are worsening. Lacking is any coherent regional policy or
semblance of real strategy -- counterinsurgency being only a method of
fighting and a set of tactics for doing so. In place of strategic
coherence there is just one knee-jerk response: escalation. As
unexpected events grip the Obama administration by the throat, its
officials increasingly act as if further escalation were their only
choice, their fated choice.

This response is eerily familiar. It permeated Washington’s
mentality in the Vietnam War years. In fact, one of the strangest
aspects of that war was the way America’s leaders -- including
President Lyndon Johnson -- felt increasingly helpless and hopeless
even as they committed themselves to further steps up the ladder of
escalation.

We don’t know what the main actors in Obama’s war are feeling. We
don’t have their private documents or their secret taped
conversations. Nonetheless, it should ring a bell when, as wars
devolve, the only response Washington can imagine is further escalation.

Washington Boxed In

By just about every recent account, including new reports from the independent Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon,
the U.S. mission in Afghanistan is going dreadfully, even as the
Taliban insurgency gains potency and expands. This spring, preparing
for his first relatively minor U.S. offensive in Marja, a
Taliban-controlled area of Helmand Province, General McChrystal
confidently announced that, after the insurgents were dislodged, an
Afghan “government in a box” would be rolled out.
From a governing point of view, however, the offensive seems to have
been a fiasco. The Taliban is now reportedly re-infiltrating the area,
while the governmental apparatus in that nation-building “box” has
proven next to nonexistent, corrupt, and thoroughly incompetent.

Today, according to a report
by the International Council on Security and Development (ICOS), the
local population is far more hostile to the American effort. According
to the ICOS, “61% of Afghans interviewed feel more negative about NATO
forces after Operation Moshtarak than they did before the February
military offensive in Marja.”

As Alissa Rubin of the New York Timessummed up the situation in Afghanistan more generally:

"Even as American troops clear areas of militants, they find either
no government to fill the vacuum, as in Marja, or entrenched power
brokers, like President Karzai's brother in Kandahar, who monopolize
NATO contracts and other development projects and are resented by large
portions of the population. In still other places, government officials
rarely show up at work and do little to help local people, and in most
places the Afghan police are incapable of providing security.
Corruption, big and small, remains an overwhelming complaint."

In other words, the U.S. really doesn’t have an “adequate partner,”
and this is all the more striking since the Taliban is by no stretch of
the imagination a particularly popular movement of national
resistance. As in Vietnam, a counterinsurgency war lacking a genuine
governmental partner is an oxymoron, not to speak of a recipe for
disaster.

Not surprisingly, doubts about General McChrystal’s war plan are reportedlyspreading inside the Pentagon and in Washington, even before it’s been fully launched. The major U.S. summer “operation” -- it’s no longer being labeled an “offensive” -- in the Kandahar region already shows signs of “faltering”and its unpopularity is rising among an increasingly resistant local population. In addition, civilian deaths from U.S. and NATO actions are distinctly on the rise and widely unsettling to Afghans. Meanwhile, military
and police forces being trained in U.S./NATO mentoring programs
considered crucial to Obama’s war plans are proving remarkably hapless.

McClatchy News, for example, recently reported
that the new Afghan National Civil Order Police (ANCOP), a specially
trained elite force brought into the Marja area and “touted as the
country's best and brightest” is, according to “U.S. military
strategists[,] plagued by the same problems as Afghanistan's
conventional police, who are widely considered corrupt, ineffective and
inept.” Drug use and desertions in ANCOP have been rife.

And yet, it seems as if all that American officials can come up
with, in response to the failed Times Square car bombing and the “news”
that the bomber was supposedly trained in Waziristan by the Pakistani Taliban, is the demand that Pakistan allow
“more of a boots-on-the-ground strategy” and more American trainers
into the country. Such additional U.S. forces would serve only “as
advisers and trainers, not as combat forces.” So the mantra now goes
reassuringly, but given the history of the Vietnam War, it’s a
cringe-worthy demand.

In the meantime, the Obama administration has officially widened its targeting in the CIA drone war
in the Pakistani borderlands to include low-level, no-name militants.
It is also ratcheting up such attacks, deeply unpopular in a country
where 64% of the inhabitants, according to a recent poll, already view the United States as an "enemy" and only 9% as a “partner.”

Since the Times Square incident, the CIA has specifically been striking North Waziristan, where the Pakistani army has as yet refrained from launching operations. The U.S., as the Nation’s Jeremy Scahill reports, has also increased its support for the Pakistani Air Force, which will only add to the wars in the skies of that country.

All of this represents escalation of the “covert” U.S. war in
Pakistan. None of it offers particular hope of success. All of it
stokes enmity and undoubtedly encourages more “lone wolf” jihadis to lash out at the U.S. It’s a formula for blowback, but not for victory.

BP-Style Pragmatism Goes to War

One thing can be said about the Bush administration: it had a grand
strategic vision to go with its wars. Its top officials were convinced
that the American military, a force they saw as unparalleled on planet
Earth, would be capable of unilaterally shock-and-awing America’s
enemies in what they liked to call “the arc of instability” or “the
Greater Middle East” (that is, the oil heartlands of the planet). Its
two wars would bring not just Afghanistan and Iraq, but Iran and Syria
to their knees, leaving Washington to impose a Pax Americana
on the Middle East and Central Asia (in the process of which groups
like Hamas and Hezbollah would be subdued and anti-American jihadism ended).

They couldn’t, of course, have been more wrong, something quite
apparent to the Obama team. Now, however, we have a crew in Washington
who seem to have no vision, great or small, when it comes to American
foreign or imperial policy, and who seem, in fact, to lack any sense of
strategy at all. What they have is a set of increasingly discredited
tactics and an approach that might pass for good old American
see-what-works “pragmatism,” but these days might more aptly be labeled
“BP-style pragmatism.”

The vision may be long gone, but the wars live on with their own
inexorable momentum. Add into the mix American domestic politics,
which could discourage any president from changing course and
de-escalating a war, and you have what looks like a fatal -- and fatally expensive -- brew.

We’ve moved from Bush’s visionary disasters to Obama’s flailing
wars, while the people of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq continue to
pay the price. If only we could close the curtain on this strange mix
of farce and tragedy, but evidently we’re still stuck in act four of a
five-act nightmare.

Even as our Afghan and Pakistani wars are being sucked dry of
whatever meaning might remain, the momentum is in only one direction --
toward escalation. A thousand repetitions of an
al-Qaeda-must-be-destroyed mantra won’t change that one bit. More
escalation, unfortunately, is yet to come.

[Note on Sources: Let me offer one of my periodic
appreciative bows to several websites I rely on for crucial information
and interpretation when it comes to America’s wars: Juan Cole’s
invaluable, often incandescent, Informed Comment blog, Antiwar.com (especially Jason Ditz’s remarkable daily war news summaries), the thoughtful framing and good eye of Paul Woodward at the War in Context website, and Katherine Tiedemann’s concise, useful daily briefs
of the most interesting mainstream reportage on Afghanistan and
Pakistan at the AfPak Channel website. A special bow to historian
Marilyn Young, author of the classic book The Vietnam Wars,
who keeps me abreast of the latest thinking on all sorts of war-related
subjects via her own informal information service for friends and
fellow historians.]

May 13, 2010

The Tea Party’s Guide to American Exceptionalism (It Is All About Race) By Greg Grandin

Americans, it’s been said, learn geography when they go to war.
Now, it seems, many get their history when they go to a Tea Party rally
or tune in to Glenn Beck.

History is a “battlefield of ideas,” as Beck recently put it, while
looking professorial in front of a blackboard filled with his trademark
circled names connected by multidirectional arrows, his hands covered
with chalk dust. In this struggle, movement historians like Beck go
all in, advancing a comprehensive interpretation of American history
meant to provide analytical clarity to believers and potential converts
alike. As paranoid as it may be, this history is neither radical nor
revisionist, since the Tea Party activists and their fellow travelers
pluck at some of the major chords of American nationalism.

It’s easy to dismiss the iconography of the movement: the wigs and
knee breeches, the founding-father fetishism, the coiled snakes, and,
yes, the tea bags. It’s no less easy to laugh at recent historical
howlers like the claims of Dick Armey, who heads FreedomWorks, a corporate Tea Party front, that Jamestown was settled by “socialists” or the Texas School Board’s airbrushing of Deist Thomas Jefferson from its history textbooks. It’s fun to ridicule Beck, as Jon Stewart recently did, when he goes all “Da Vinci Code,” and starts connecting Woodrow Wilson, Mussolini, and ACORN in order to explain 2008’s economic collapse.

But historical analysis is about making connections, and there is,
in fact, coherence to the Tea Party version of history, which allows
conservative cadres not just to interpret the world but to act in it.
And yes, it is all about race.

The 1040 Archipelago

At the heart of Tea Party history is the argument that
“progressivism is fascism is communism.” Conceptually, such a claim
helps frame what many call “American exceptionalism,” a belief that the
exclusive role of government is to protect individual rights -- to
speech, to assembly, to carry guns, and, of course, to own property --
and not to deliver social rights like health care, education, or
welfare.

At
Tea Party rallies and on right-wing blogs, it’s common to hear that,
since the time of President Woodrow Wilson, progressives have been
waging a “hundred-year-long war” on America’s unique values. This bit
of wisdom comes directly from Beck, who has become something like the
historian laureate of American exceptionalism, devoting many on-air
hours to why progressivism is a threat equal to Nazism and Stalinism.

Progressives, he typically says, "started a hundred-year time bomb.
They planted it in the early 1900s." Beck has compared himself to
"Israeli Nazi hunters," promising,
with language more easily associated with the Nazis than those who
pursued them, to track down the progressive “vampires” who are “sucking
the blood out of the republic."

As Michael Lind pointed out in a recent essay at Salon.com, behind such Sturm-und-Drang
language lurks a small group of relatively obscure historians, teaching
in peaceful, leafy liberal arts colleges, many of them influenced by
the late University of Chicago political theorist Leo Strauss.
They argue that the early twentieth-century progressive movement
betrayed the very idea of universal natural rights invested in the
individual, embracing instead a relativist “cult of the state.” As a
result, a quest for “social justice” was elevated above the defense of
“liberty” -- a path which led straight to the gulag and the 1040 short
form. From there, it was an easy leap to History’s terminus: the
Obamacare Death Panels.

These historians and their popular interpreters, especially Beck and Jonah Goldberg, the author of Liberal Fascism,
naturally ignore the real threats to individualism that the
turn-of-the-twentieth-century progressive movement was responding to --
namely a massive concentration of corporate political and economic
power and Gilded Era “wage slavery.” Instead, they present history as a
zero-sum, all-or-nothing “battlefield of ideas,” with the founding
fathers, Abraham Lincoln, and Winston Churchill on one side, and
Jefferson Davis, Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Stalin, Hitler, and Obama
on the other. The individual versus the state. Freedom versus slavery.

In such an epic view of American history, there is, however, a fly
in the ointment or, more accurately, a Confederate in the conceptual
attic -- and that’s the inability of the Tea Party and affiliated
right-wing movements to whistle past Dixie.

Is the Tea Party Racist?

Of course
it is. Polls confirm that Tea Party militants entertain deep-seated
racial resentment. In April, a New York Times/CBS News study revealed
that most tea partiers tend to be over 45, white, male, affluent, and
educated and think that “too much has been made of the problems facing
black people.” A high percentage of them also believe that Obama
favors blacks over whites.

But to say the movement is racist based only on the spit and vitriol hurled
at African-American congressmen and civil rights activists like Emanuel
Cleaver, or on the placards depicting Obama as a monkey or a pimp,
allows for rebuttal. The minute the reality of the spitting incident
is challenged and “Don’t Tread on Me” is substituted for “Go Back to
Kenya,” voilà, the movement is instantly as wholesome as apple pie.

A debate over a recent University of Washington poll helps us
understand why the movement is racist no matter which slogans and
symbols it chooses to use. The poll found
that “support for the Tea Party remains a valid predictor of racial
resentment.” When right-wingers offered the criticism that the
pollsters' methodology conflated racism with support for
small-government ideology, they reexamined their data and found
themselves in agreement (of a sort) with their critics. “Ideology,”
they wrote in a follow up, was indeed an important factor, for “as
people become more conservative, it increases by 23 percent the chance
that they're racially resentful.” In other words, it wasn’t membership
in the Tea Party movement per se that predicted racism, but
conservatism itself (though the Tea Party does have a higher percentage
of members who displayed racism than conservatism in general).

This should surprise no one. After all, the Founding Fathers cut
Thomas Jefferson’s description of slavery as an “execrable commerce”
and an “assemblage of horrors” from the final draft of the Declaration
of Independence, and race has been crucially embedded in the conception
of the patriot ideal of the sovereign individual ever since. As
Harvard historian Jill Lepore has written
about the original Boston Tea Party, the colonists had a choice:
“either abolish slavery… [or] resist parliamentary rule. It could not
do both.” Many in Virginia, of course, didn’t want to do both.
Instead, they simply defined the defense of slavery as part of American
liberty.

While Jefferson, himself a slaveholder, failed in his effort to
extend the notion of individual inalienable rights to blacks, he was
successful in setting two rhetorical precedents that would continue to
influence American political culture. First, he used chattel slavery
as a metaphor for British tyranny, equating the oppression of Africans
with the oppression of the white colonists. At the same time, he
stoked racial fears to incite rebellion: King George III, he wrote,
was “exciting” blacks to “rise in arms among us, and to purchase that
liberty of which he has deprived them by murdering” whites. One could
draw a straight line from these words to George H.W. Bush’s infamous 1988 Willie Horton ad.

From then on, the ideal of the assertion and protection of
individual rights was regularly bound up with racial demonology. Anglo
genocidal campaigns against and land theft from Native Americans, for
instance, contributed to the influential theories concerning property of John Locke,
who before Beck arrived on the scene, was considered “America’s
philosopher,” the man most associated with the notion of God-given
inalienable individual rights and restricted government.

Once such theories were formulated, they were then used to further
justify dispossession, contributing, as law professor Howard Berman put it,
to the “Americanization of the law of real property.” The nineteenth
century was known for a frenzied speculative capitalism that generated
staggering inequality. At the same time, eliminationist wars that
drove Indian removal, the illegal invasion of Mexico by the United
States in 1846, and the ongoing subjugation of African Americans helped
stabilize the Daniel Boone-like image of a disciplined, propertied,
white male self -- and did so by contrasting it with racial enemies who
were imagined to be unbridled (like the speculative capitalists), but
also abject and property-less.

The Civil War cemented the metaphor whereby the free individual was
defined by (and endangered by) his opposite, the slave, and has been
used ever since to frame conflicts that often, on the surface at least,
don’t seem to be about race at all. It’s a point nicely illustrated
recently by Dale Robertson, a prominent Tea Party organizer, who carried a sign at a rally that read: “Congress = Slaveowner, Taxpayer = Niggar.” Beck, for his part, has identified
ACORN, the Service Employees International Union or SEIU, the census,
and the healthcare bill, among other threats, as laying the foundation
for a “modern-day slave state” in which, of course, his overwhelmingly
white following could be reduced to the status of slaves. As to
progressives, he has said
that, “back in Samuel Adams' day, they used to call them tyrants. A
little later I think they were also called slave owners, people who
encourage you to become more dependent on them.”

Sometimes, though, it really is just about race: “Obama’s Plan,” announced one placard at a Wisconsin Tea Party gathering, would lead to “White Slavery.”

Lock-And-Load Populism

When Tea Partiers say “Obama is trying to turn us into something we
are not,” as one did recently on cable TV, they are not wrong. It’s an
honest statement, acknowledging that attempts to implement any
government policies to help the poor would signal an assault on
American exceptionalism, defined by Beck and likeminded others as
extreme individualism.

The issue is not really the specific content of any particular policy. As any number of frustrated observers
can testify, it is no use pointing out that, say, the healthcare
legislation that passed is fundamentally conservative and similar to past Republican healthcare plans, or that Obama has actually lowered taxes for most Americans, or that he gets an F rating
from the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. The issue is the idea
of public policy itself, which, for many on the right, violates an
ideal of absolute individual rights.

In other words, any version of progressive taxation, policy, and
regulation, no matter how mild, or for that matter, of social “justice”
and the “common good” -- qualities the Texas School Board recently
deleted from its textbook definition of “good citizenship” -- are not
simply codes for race. They are race. To put it another way, individual supremacy has been, historically speaking, white supremacy.

This helps explain why it is impossible for the anti-Obama backlash to restrain its Tourette-like
references to the Civil War to frame its fight, or its rhetorical
spasms invoking secession and nullification, or its urge to carry
Confederate flags as well as signs equating taxpayers with slaves.
That America’s first Black president’s first major social legislation
was health care -- something so intimately, even invasively about the
body, the place where the social relations of race are physically
inscribed (and recorded in differential mortality rates) -- pushed the
world-turned-upside-down carnival on display every night on Fox News,
where the privileged fancy themselves powerless, another step toward
the absurd.

The deepest contradiction may, however, lie in this: the teabaggers
who reject any move by Big Government when it comes to social policy at
home remain devoted, as Andrew Sullivan recently wrote,
to the Biggest Budget-Busting Government of All, the
“military-industrial-ideological complex” and its all-powerful
commander-in-chief executive (and surprising numbers of them are also
dependent on that complex’s give-away welfare state when it comes to
their livelihoods).

As James Bovard, a consistent libertarian, has observed,
“many ‘tea party’ activists staunchly oppose big government, except
when it is warring, wiretapping, or waterboarding.” For all the signs asking “Who is John Galt?,” the movement has openly embraced
Arizona’s new “show-me-your-papers” immigration law and mutters not one
complaint over the fact that America is “the most incarcerated society
on earth,” something Robert Perkinson detailed in Texas Tough,
his book on the Lone Star roots of the U.S. penitentiary system. The
skin color of those being tortured, rounded up, and jailed obviously
has something to do with the selective libertarianism of much of the
conservative movement. But this passion for pain and punishment is also
an admission that the crisis-prone ideal of absolute individualism,
forged in racial violence, would be unsustainable without further state
violence.

Behind the lock-and-load populism and the kitsch calls to “rearm for
revolution” is a recognition that the right’s agenda of corporate
deregulation -- the effects of which are evident in exploding coal
mines in West Virginia and apocalyptic oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico
-- can only be achieved through ceaseless mobilization against enemies
domestic and foreign.

Here’s an example: “I know that the safety and health of coal miners is my most important job,” said
Don Blankenship at a corporate-funded Friends of America rally held in
West Virginia last Labor Day, where speakers such as Ted Nugent and
Sean Hannity spoke out
against tyrants, regulation, “Obama and his cronies,” taxes,
cap-and-trade legislation, unnamed “cockroaches,” China, green
technology, and, naturally, gun control. Blankenship just happens to
be the CEO of Massey Energy, owner of the Upper Big Branch mine where
29 workers recently lost their lives.

He is also famous for waving the banner of individual rights even as he presides
over a company that any totalitarian state worth its salt would envy,
one that intimidates “its workers into a type of lock-step compliance
that most often takes the form of silence,” including threats to fire
workers who take time off to attend the funerals of the dead miners.
Wrapping himself in the American flag -- literally, wearing
a stars-and-strips shirt and baseball cap -- Blankenship told that
Labor Day crowd that he didn’t “need Washington politicians to tell”
him about mine safety. Seven months later, 29 miners are dead.

The End of American Exceptionalism

And here’s the irony, or one of them anyway: in the process of
defining American exceptionalism as little more than a pitchfork
loyalty to individual rights, Beck and other right-wingers are
themselves becoming the destroyers of what was exceptional,
governmentally speaking, about the United States. Like John Locke’s
celebration of inalienable rights, Founding Father James Madison’s
distrust of the masses became a distinctive feature of American
political culture. Madison valued individual rights, but in the
tripartite American system of government he worked hard to help
fashion, a bulwark meant to contain the passions he knew they
generated. “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire,” he wrote in
1787, and in the centuries that followed, American politicians would
consistently define their unique democracy against the populist and
revolutionary excesses of other countries.

Today, though, not just Fox News Jacobins like Beck and Hannity but
nearly the entire leadership of the Republican Party are fanning those
flames. Newt Gingrich hopes
the Tea Party will become the “militant wing of the Republican Party,”
looking to hitch his political fortunes to a movement now regularly calling
for a “second bloody revolution.” It is hard to think of another time
in American history when one half of the political establishment has so
wholly embraced insurrectionary populism as an electoral strategy.

Considering the right’s success at mimicking the organizing tactics
of the left, it would be tempting to see recent calls for rebellion and
violence as signs that the conservative movement is entering its
Weathermen phase -- the moment in the 1960s and 1970s when some
left-wing activists succumbed to revolutionary fantasies, contributing
to the New Left’s crackup. Except that violence did not really come
all that easy to the American leftists of that moment. There was
endless theorizing and agonizing, Leninist justifying and Dostoevskian
moralizing, from which the left, considering the ongoing
finger-pointing and mea culpas, still hasn’t recovered.

In contrast, conservative entitlement to the threat of violence is
so baked into American history that, in moments like this, it seems to
be taken for granted.
The Tea Party crowd, along with its militia, NRA, and Oath Keeper
friends, would just as easily threaten to overthrow the federal
government -- or waterboard Nancy Pelosi -- as go golfing.

On the 15th anniversary of the bombing of the Oklahoma Federal
Building, which left 168 people dead and 600 wounded, gun-rights
militants held a rally at the capital mall in Washington, along with a
smaller, heavily armed one across the Potomac, where speaker after
speaker threatened revolution and invoked the federal siege of Waco to justify the Oklahoma bombing. This is the kind of militancy Gingrich believes the Republicans can harness and which he tenderly calls a “natural expression” of frustration.

Where all this will lead, who knows? But you still “don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”

Greg Grandin is a professor of history at New York University. His most recent book, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City,
just published in paperback, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the
National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and
was picked by the New York Times, the New Yorker, and NPR for their “best of” lists. A new edition of his previous book, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States and the Rise of the New Imperialism, will be published later this year.

May 11, 2010

Isn’t it time to call what Congress will soon vote on by its right name: war escalation funding?

Early in 2009, President Barack Obama escalated the
war in Afghanistan with 21,000 "combat" troops, 13,000 "support"
troops, and at least 5,000 mercenaries, without any serious debate in
Congress or the corporate media. The President sent the first 17,000
troops prior to developing any plan for Afghanistan, leaving the
impression that escalation was, somehow, an end in itself. Certainly
it didn't accomplish anything else, a conclusion evident in downbeat
reports on the Afghan war situation issued this month by both the Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon.

So it seemed like progress for our representative government when,
last fall, the media began to engage in a debate over whether further
escalation in Afghanistan made sense. Granted, this was largely a
public debate between the commander-in-chief and his generals (who
should probably have been punished with removal from office for insubordinate behavior), but members of Congress at least popped up in cameo roles.

In September, for instance, 57 members of Congress sent
a letter to the president opposing an escalation of the war. In
October, Congresswoman Barbara Lee introduced a bill to prohibit the
funding of any further escalation. In December, various groups of
Congress members sent letters
to the president and to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi opposing an
escalation and asking for a chance to vote on it. Even as Congress voted overwhelmingly
for a massive war and military budget in December, some representatives
did speak out against further escalation and the funding needed for it.

While all sides in this debate agreed that such escalation funding
would need to be voted on sometime in the first half of 2010, everyone knew
something else as well: that the President would go ahead and escalate
in Afghanistan even without funding in place -- the money all being
borrowed anyway -- and that, once many or all of the new troops were
there, he would get less resistance from Congress which would be voting
on something that had already happened.

The corporate media went along with this bait-and-switch strategy,
polling and reporting on the escalation debate in Washington until the
president fell in line behind his generals (give or take 10,000 or so
extra troops). The coming vote was then relabeled as a simple matter
of "war funding." This was convenient, since Americans are far more
likely to oppose escalating already unpopular wars than just keeping
them going -- and would be likely to oppose such funding even more
strongly if the financial tradeoffs involved were made clear. However,
a new poll shows a majority of Americans do not believe that this war is worth fighting at all.

Nonetheless, as in a tale foretold, Congress is expected to vote
later this month on $33 billion in further “war funding” to pay for
sending 30,000 troops (plus "support" troops, etc.) to Afghanistan --
most of whom are already there or soon will be. In addition, an extra
$2 billion is being requested for aid and “civilian” operations in
Afghanistan (much of which may actually go to the Afghan military and
police), $2.5 billion for the same in our almost forgotten war in Iraq,
and another $2 billion for aid to (or is it a further military presence
in?) Haiti.

This upcoming vote, of course, provides the opportunity that our
representatives were asking for half a year ago. They can now vote the
president’s escalation up or down in the only way that could possibly
be enforced, by voting its funding up or down. Blocking the funding in
the House of Representatives would mean turning those troops around and
bringing them back home -- and unlike the procedure for passing a bill,
there would be no need for any action by the Senate or the president.

What Does $33 Billion Look Like?

So, how much money are we talking about exactly? Well not enough,
evidently, for the teabagging enemies of reckless government spending
to take notice. Clearly not enough for the labor movement or any other
advocates of spending on jobs or healthcare or education or green
energy to disturb their slumbers. God forbid! Yet it’s still a
sizeable number by a certain reckoning.

After all, 33 billion miles could take you to the sun 226 times.
And $33 billion could radically alter any non-military program in
existence. There's a bill in the Senate, for instance, that would
prevent schools from laying off teachers in all 50 states for a mere
$23 billion. Another $9.6 billion would quadruple the Department of
Energy's budget for renewable energy. Now, what to do with that extra
$0.4 billion?

And remember what this $33 billion actually involves: adding more
troops, support troops, and private contractors, whose work, in turn,
will mean ongoing higher costs to maintain the Afghan occupation, construct new bases
there, fuel the machines of war, and provide the weaponry. Keep in
mind as well that various other costs associated with the president’s
most recent "surge" are hidden in the budgets of the CIA, the
Department of State, and other parts of the government. Looking just
at the military, however, this is $33 billion to be added to an
unfathomable pile of waste. According to the Congressional Budget
Office, Congress has already approved $345 billion for war in Afghanistan, not to mention $708 billion in Iraq.

According to the National Priorities Project, for that same money we could have renewable energy
in 1,083,271,391 homes for a year (or every home in the country for
more than 10 years), or pay 17,188,969 elementary school teachers for a
year. There may be 2.6 million elementary and middle school teachers
in our country now. Assuming we could use 3 million teachers, we could
hire them all for five years and employ that extra $13 billion or so to
give them bonuses. "Honor our brave teachers" anyone?

Even these calculations, however, are misleading. As economists Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz demonstrated in The Three Trillion Dollar War, their book on the cost of the Iraq war alone,
adding in debt payments on moneys borrowed to fight that war, long-term
care for veterans wounded in it, the war's impact on energy prices, and
other macroeconomic impacts, the current tax bill for the Iraq War must
be at least tripled and probably quadrupled or more to arrive at its
real long-term cost. (Similarly, the cost in lives must be multiplied
by all those lives that could have been saved through other, better
uses of the same funding.) The same obviously applies to the Afghan
War.

The fact is that military spending is destroying the U.S. economy. An excellent report from the National Priorities Project, “Security Spending Primer," provides a summary of research that supports these basic and well-documented facts:

*Investing public dollars in the military produces fewer jobs than cutting taxes.

*Cutting taxes produces fewer jobs than investing public dollars in
any of these areas: healthcare, education, mass transit, or
construction for home weatherization and infrastructural repair.

*Investing public dollars in mass transit or education produces more than twice as many jobs as investing in the military.

*Investing public dollars in education produces better paying jobs than investing in the military or cutting taxes.

*Investing public dollars in any of these areas: healthcare,
education, mass transit, construction for home weatherization and
infrastructural repair has a larger direct and indirect economic impact
than investing in the military or cutting taxes.

Too
broad a view? Then consider just the present proposed $33 billion
escalation funding for the Afghan War. For that sum, we could have 20
green energy jobs paying $50,000 per year here in the United States for
every soldier sent to Afghanistan; a job, that is, for each of those
former soldiers and 19 other Americans. We're spending on average $400 per gallon
to transport gas over extended and difficult supply lines into
Afghanistan where the U.S. military uses 27 million gallons a month.
We're spending hundreds of millions of dollars to bribe various small
nations to be part of a “coalition” there. We're spending at least
that much to bribe Afghans to join our side, an effort that has so far recruited
only 646 Taliban guerrillas, many of whom seem to have taken the money
and run back to the other side. Does all this sound like a wise
investment -- or the kind of work Wall Street would do?

What Excuses Are They Using?

A strong case
can be made that the war in Afghanistan is illegal, immoral, against
the public will, counterproductive on its own terms, and an economic
catastrophe. The present path of escalation there appears militarily
hopeless. The most recent Pentagon assessment once again indicates
that the Taliban’s strength is growing;
according to polling, 94% of the inhabitants of Kandahar, the area
where the next U.S. offensive is to take place this summer, want peace negotiations, not war, and a U.S. plan to seek local consent for the coming assault has been scrapped.

Many members of Congress will still tell you that our goal in
Afghanistan is to "win" or to "keep us safe" or to "get bin Laden."
But those who opposed the escalation last year, and the 65 members of
the House of Representatives who voted to end the war entirely on March 10th, seem to be offering remarkably insubstantial excuses for refusing to commit to a no-vote on the $33 billion in escalation funding.

I recently asked Congressman Jerrold Nadler, for example, if he
would vote no on that funding, and he replied that he absolutely would
-- unless the Democratic leadership put something so good into the bill
that he wouldn’t want to vote against it. In just this way, aid for
Hurricane Katrina victims, the extension of unemployment insurance, and
all sorts of other goodies have been added to war and escalation
funding bills over the years.

Nadler claimed that the Haiti aid already in the bill wouldn't win
his vote, but something else might. In other words, if there were any
chance of the bill being in trouble, Nadler's vote could essentially be
bought simply by adding some goody he likes. Never mind whether or not
it outweighed $33 billion worth of damage; never mind if the benefit,
whatever it might be, could pass separately. The point is that Nadler
is not really committed to ending the war or even blocking its
escalation in the way he would be if he committed himself now to a no
vote and lobbied his colleagues to join him. Instead, he’s ready to
pose as a war opponent only as long as his stance proves no threat to
the war. And in this, he's typical.

Congressman Bill Delahunt gave me a unique excuse
for not committing in advance to a no vote on the funding. He craved
the attention, he said, that comes from not announcing how you will
vote -- as if such attention matters more than the lives he might fund
the taking of. Radio host Nicole Sandler took up my question and asked
Congressman Kendrick Meek what he was planning to do. He responded by
claiming that he hadn't yet been briefed about the war and so couldn't
decide.

Congressman Donald Payne gave me an excuse
(now common among Democrats who evidently haven't read the Constitution
in a while) guaranteed to lead to a yes vote: he must support his
president and so plans to vote for what the President tells him to.

Some excuses can only be anticipated at this point. Many congress members will, for instance, undoubtedly settle for voting for
a relatively meaningless non-binding exit-timetable amendment to the
bill, or at least co-sponsor a bill identical to that amendment, and
some will likely use that as reasonable cover for casting their votes
to fund the escalation.

Antiwar advocates for peace and justice are not taking
all of this lying down. Cities are passing resolutions opposing any
more war funding. People are holding vigils and sit-ins at local
congressional offices -- more than 100 of which are planned for May 19th. Congressional phones are ringing, newspaper editors are receiving letters, and an online whip list
-- a list of where every House member stands -- is being constantly
updated. In the end, though, the fundamental question is how many
people will outgrow their partisan loyalties, of either variety, and
tell their representative that they will vote for someone else if he or
she votes for more war.

An extreme step? Well, what do you call wasting $33 billion on a
hopeless, immoral, illegal war that a majority of Americans oppose, and
denying those same dollars to job creation or any other decent purpose?

May 08, 2010

Writing about U.S. Middle East policy used to be a boring job. You’d
start out with “The U.S. supports Israel’s stand on...” and then just
fill in the details. No longer. Many pundits claim to smell the winds
of policy change blowing from the White House. Every word about the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the president or his advisors is now
parsed by journalists like so many soothsayers studying oracle bones.

Mr. Obama himself remains as cryptic as those bones and as open to
divergent interpretations. At a recent press
conference, he cautioned that "the two sides may say to themselves,
'We are not prepared to resolve these issues no matter how much
pressure the United States brings to bear.'"

In the same breath, though, the president added: “It is a vital
national security interest of the United States to reduce these
conflicts because… when conflicts break out, one way or another, we get
pulled into them. And that ends up costing us significantly in terms of
both blood and treasure.”

Blood and treasure… Aha! the New York Timesexclaimed,
the president is signaling “a renewed determination to reinsert himself
into the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.” “Obama’s recalibration of U.S.
Middle East diplomacy is ground-shifting,” Times columnist
Roger Cohen reported
from Jerusalem. “He’s being pummeled from the usual quarters but he’ll
stay the course.” Noam Chomsky, however, speaks
for the many skeptical observers who expect Obama to stay on the old
course of U.S. backing for Israel’s domination of the Palestinians.

Yet rumors of change are distinctly in the air. “If
Israeli-Palestinian talks remain stalemated into September or October,
[Obama] will convene an international summit on achieving Mideast
peace,” says one typical report. The
U.S. will no longer veto “UN security council condemnation of any
significant new Israeli settlement activity,” says another.
The U.S. will push for a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East, says a third.

Some Washington insiders claim
that Obama intends to propose his own peace plan. Obama denies this,
but were he to change his mind, Bill Clinton, for one, says
he would “strongly support it.” When White House Chief of Staff Rahm
Emanuel was questioned
about the possibility and he responded only, “That time is not now,” he
left plenty of room for speculation that the time might be coming soon.

Such speculation is rife in Israel, where the editors of Ha’aretzadvised
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to “accede to Obama’s
recommendations, lest it end with an imposed settlement.”

So far there’s nothing but a riot of rumors. Still, most of those
rumors have been floated -- think “trial balloon” -- by some faction
inside the Beltway, if not inside the administration itself. Right now,
the rumor mill may be the strongest weapon of those insiders eager to
push U.S. policy in a new direction when it comes to Israel. In that
sense, the unprecedented buzz of speculation already in the air could be
considered their first victory: opening up the possibility of a serious
debate in Washington (at last) about the realities of the Middle East
and American policy.

Right-wingers are, in turn, mobilizing to quash that debate before it
really begins. Whether they succeed -- and what Obama actually does in
the end -- depends largely on how much countervailing pressure he
feels.

Certainly, a heated discussion on the left is now focused on
precisely what steps the U.S. should take to curb the Israelis and gain
justice for the Palestinians -- a vital question, to be sure. Yet
there’s a curious scarcity of discussion about why the administration is
opening up room for debate now and, should it recalibrate policy, what
its ultimate aims will be. Those questions deserve careful attention --
and they turn out to be closely linked to each other.

Protecting Troops or Interests?

Obama seemed to explain his motives succinctly enough when he offered
that striking warning about the risks to American “blood and treasure.”
According
to the New York Times, he was “drawing an explicit link
between the Israeli-Palestinian strife and the safety of American
soldiers as they battle Islamic extremism and terrorism,” echoing a
recent warning from Centcom commander General David Petraeus, the man in
charge of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Apparently this new message from the military elite, more than
anything else, is moving the Obama administration toward pressing the
Israelis, as well as the Palestinians, to make real concessions for
peace. As journalist Mark Perry, who first
broke the Petraeus story, says: no DC lobby -- not even the Israel
lobby -- "is as important, or as powerful, as the U.S. military."

But are
U.S. military lives really the Pentagon’s chief concern? As the Times
added in passing, Petraeus “has denied reports that he was suggesting
that soldiers were being put in harm’s way by American support for
Israel.” The general’s denial was quite accurate. When he briefed
the Senate Armed Services Committee, he said nothing about troops.
What he said was that “anti-American sentiments” fomented by the
Israeli-Arab conflict “present distinct challenges to our ability to
advance our interests” in what Washington still likes to call the
Greater Middle East. According to Perry, the Pentagon’s private warning
to the White House, too, was only about threats to U.S. “interests.”

The sole administration official who may have issued a warning
specifically about danger to U.S. troops was Vice President Joe Biden,
who reportedly
told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “What you’re doing here
undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and Pakistan.”

Troops or interests? The distinction is far from trivial. “Interests”
are measured in national wealth and power, not the quality of
individual lives. So here’s the crucial question overlooked by most
observers tracking Obama’s every halting step when it comes to Middle
East policy: Is the administration’s highest goal to protect blood or
treasure, human lives or American interests? It cannot do both and so,
sooner or later, it -- or a succeeding administration -- will have to
choose one or the other.

That choice will be critical if the administration does indeed plan
to change the Middle East status quo. Not even Obama’s most
eloquent words will be enough to get the job done. Palestinian Authority
leaders have shown that they won’t come to the negotiating table in a
serious way without concrete evidence that they’ll achieve a viable
state of their own. To achieve anything less would doom them in future
elections.

On the other side, as Tony Karon has written, until
there is a “downside to the status quo for Israel… things are
unlikely to change.” So if the Obama administration is going to go down
in history as the author of an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, it
must do what Bill Clinton never did: Put together the right package of
sticks and carrots.

It really could happen. No conflict goes on forever, and no political
leaders are immune to carefully crafted pressures and inducements. But
again, the president and his advisors will have to make the most basic
of decisions: blood or imperial treasure?

Here’s how the options look at the moment:

Convincing Divided Palestinians: The Obama administration
has already dangled a big fat carrot in front of the Palestinian
Authority: Biden’s statement
in Ramallah that the U.S. is “fully committed” to achieving a
Palestinian state “that is independent, viable, and contiguous.”

The Palestine Liberation Organization rejected
Clinton’s peace parameters in 2000 because they would “divide a
Palestinian state into three separate cantons connected and divided by
Jewish-only and Arab-only roads and jeopardize a Palestinian state’s
viability.” In fact, every plan Israel has ever offered, or even hinted
at accepting, would leave a new Palestinian state as an “archipelago”
(as the New York Timesput
it) of disconnected patches of land.

If, however, the U.S. turns Biden’s word -- “contiguous” -- into a
binding commitment, encompassing virtually all of the West Bank and
Gaza, it would be hard for the Palestinians to walk away. It would be
even harder if the U.S. offered another feasible and very green carrot: a
promise of many dollars flowing for many years from Washington to
Palestine. That's how Jimmy Carter bought peace between Israel and
Egypt in 1978 by promising billions dollars of aid to both sides (money
still flowing by the billions today).

Aid to Palestine could be presented as compensation to the
Palestinians who fled their lands and homes in 1948, which might help
defuse the “right of return” issue. Many Palestinians would express
understandable outrage, but when former Chairman of the Palestinian
Liberation Organization Yasir Arafat wrote in a 2002 New York Timesop-ed
that “Palestinians must be realistic with respect to Israel's
demographic desires,” he was clearly signaling that a deal could be cut.
Palestinian leaders reportedly
offered the same deal to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert just
two years ago.

If such a U.S. plan is to succeed, however, these carrots must be
accompanied by a stick: forcing the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority to
share power with Hamas. Any peace agreement that excludes Hamas is, in
the long run, likely to fail.

This raises the crucial “blood versus treasure” question for the
Obama administration. Thus far it has followed its
predecessor in doing its best to pry
the two Palestinian parties apart, while labeling Hamas a “terrorist”
group bent on Israel’s destruction.

As Israeli commentator Uri Avnery recently
wrote, the continuing Fatah-Hamas split "is, to a large extent,
made in the U.S. and Israel… The Americans have a primitive model of the
world, inherited from the days of the Wild West: everywhere there are
Good Guys and Bad Guys. In Palestine, the Good Guys are the Palestinian
Authority people, the Bad Guys are Hamas."

In Washington, though, the really bad guys are the leaders of Iran,
who seem bent on challenging American regional hegemony in the oil-rich
treasure chest of the Greater Middle East. As part of its overarching
plan to forge a pan-Arab, anti-Iranian coalition, the U.S. woos the
Palestinian Authority while demonizing Hamas as an Iranian stooge. To
do so, it must ignore the palpable
softening of Hamas’s positions, especially toward
Israel.

If the administration insists on pursuing its quixotic crusade
against Iran by presenting a peace plan that excludes Hamas, the plan
will probably be doomed from the start (as will any chance of wooing
Hamas away from Iranian influence). In this way as in so many others,
the U.S. imperial policy of containing, or even destroying, the present
Iranian regime traps Washington in an endless
tangle of contradictions, while maintaining an unpalatable status
quo that leaves millions of lives in danger -- all for the sake of
protecting American dominance in the Middle East. Think of that as the
treasure option.

A U.S. policy that elevated blood -- human lives -- over imperial
treasure would demand a power-sharing rapprochement between the
Palestinian Authority and Hamas in a single state, including the West
Bank and an unbesieged Gaza, that would be free to shape its own foreign
policy. Hamas is unlikely to accept Washington’s calls for
“moderation” that are only coded demands to accept U.S. hegemony.
Genuine Palestinian independence is the only way to end the bloodshed in
the region.

Convincing Reluctant Israelis: The current Israeli
government seems determined to prevent that outcome at all costs. What
might induce the Israelis to change their minds? The most obvious
political weapon would be a reduction in military aid, which the U.S.
now supplies to the tune of more than $3
billion a year. Though enthusiasm for Israel may be waning slightly
in Congress -- mainly
among Democrats -- there is, at present, no prospect that Congress
would agree to cut that aid.

Israeli journalist Amos Harel suggests
that there may be no need to follow through on such a move. A mere leak
“about an intention to reconsider the extent of U.S. military aid” --
something easy enough for the administration to arrange -- could
suffice, shaking confidence in Israel’s long-term economic success and,
Harel predicts, “affecting the credit rating so dear to the hearts of
economists. Israel's security dependence on the United States is
tremendous.”

That’s an intriguing speculation, but it doesn’t get much attention
in Israel, where commentators focus much more on another kind of
dependence. There’s a growing
fear there that the world increasingly sees it (as a leading
Israeli think tank has warned) as an illegitimate pariah state.

The country’s president, Shimon Peres, recently said flatly:
"Israel must forge good relations with other countries, primarily the
United States, so as to guarantee political support in a time of need."
Lots of Israeli voters seem to agree. The majority “dread the global
isolation of Israel,” Bernard Avishai has
written from Jerusalem. He calls them "the party of America,"
because without continuing strong support from Washington, they fear
Israel will be left isolated, with no dependable allies at all.

Columnist Shmuel Rosner, hardly a dove, predicts
that if Obama "signaled that Israel could no longer take unconditional
US support for granted, Mr. Netanyahu’s domestic support would quickly
evaporate." Again, perhaps no more than a strong signal with a hint of
real muscle behind it could get a genuine peace process rolling.

Though this issue is largely ignored in the American mainstream
media, it’s huge in Israel. In fact, only one foreign policy issue is
larger in the Israeli public’s mind -- not the conflict with the
Palestinians, but the fear of an Iranian nuclear weapon. No matter how
fictional Iran’s nukes may be and how real the Israeli nuclear arsenal,
the Israeli fear of Iran is all too genuine.

That’s why, along with its veiled threats, the administration has
been dangling a juicy carrot for the Israelis, too: a promise of strong
anti-Iranian measures, which would make it much easier for Netanyahu (or
any Israeli leader) to accept an imposed peace plan and survive
politically.

Yet Netanyahu and his right-wing supporters are hardly grateful. They
rightly see the U.S. playing the anti-Iranian card to pressure them
into making what they consider totally unpalatable compromises with the
Palestinians. And they resent it. Their mantra is “de-linking” the two
issues. They want the U.S. to ramp up the pressure on Iran without
putting any further pressure on Israel to move toward a two-state
solution.

The Twisted Web of Empire

The Obama administration has so far refused to consider this
possibility. Apparently it’s interested only in a peace that serves
imperial interests, that protects the “treasure” of regional influence,
not to say domination, in the oil heartlands of the planet.

From Washington, the seat of empire, every conflict looks like a
strand in a single web that spans the globe. All the contradictions in
its Middle East policy are tangled threads in that twisted web. As long
as the ultimate goal is to preserve imperial power, “de-linking” is not
an option anywhere, and certainly not in such a vital region. Nor will
an imperial U.S. risk the possibility of a less-than-subservient
Palestinian government, one perhaps even friendly toward Iran.

If the administration were, however, to place blood above treasure,
it would concede that the Israeli right-wingers are indeed right about
the necessity of de-linking, though for the wrong reasons. The Israelis
want the U.S. to put all the focus on some imagined future threat from
Iran, while ignoring the current suffering and injustices inflicted on
the Palestinians by the Israeli occupation.

The alternative, truly life-saving course would be to drop the
hysterical fear-mongering about Iran and its as-yet-nonexistent bomb,
while insisting on a viable, contiguous, independent Palestinian state,
with guarantees of security for both Palestine and Israel. Only that way
can the blood of Palestinians, Israelis, and American troops be
protected. All of them would be much safer if a real Palestinian state
were to come into existence with a government open to all political
parties.

If the odds on such a development are long right now, the flurry of
rumor and speculation suggests that everything about Washington’s Middle
East policy is, at least, in flux and unpredictable. It all depends on
the climate here at home. As the public’s pro-Israel tilt wanes --
especially among Obama’s
Democratic base -- the political price for forceful U.S.
intervention goes down.

The brewing debate about U.S. Middle East policy could, and should,
spawn a larger debate here on the question: Is empire the path to
national security or the greatest threat to national security? Which do
we value more: blood or treasure?

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University
of Colorado at Boulder and a TomDispatch
regular. Read more of his writing on Israel, Palestine, and
the U.S. on his
blog.

May 05, 2010

After a week away, here’s my advice: in news terms, you can afford
to take a vacation. When I came back last Sunday, New Orleans was
bracing for tough times (again). BP, a drill-baby-drill oil company
that made $6.1 billion in the first quarter of this year and lobbied against “new, stricter safety rules” for offshore drilling, had experienced an offshore disaster for which ordinary Americans are going to pay through the nose (again).
News photographers were gearing up for the usual shots of oil-covered
wildlife (again). A White House -- admittedly Democratic, not
Republican -- had deferred to an energy company’s needs, accepted its
PR and lies, and then moved too slowly when disaster struck (again).

Okay, it may not be an exact repeat. Think of it instead as history
on cocaine. The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, already the size of
the state of Delaware, may end up larger than the disastrous Exxon Valdez spill
in Alaska, and could prove more devastating than Hurricane Katrina.
Anyway, take my word for it, returning to our world from a few days
offline and cell phone-less, I experienced an unsettling déjà-vu-all-over-again feeling. What had happened was startling and horrifying -- but also eerily expectable, if not predictable.

And, of course, when it came to our frontier wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq -- you remember them, don’t you? -- repetition has long been the
name of the game, though few here seem to notice. With an immigration
crisis, Tea Partying,
that massive oil spill, and a crude, ineptly made car bomb in Times
Square, there’s already enough to worry about. Isn’t there?

All-Volunteer Wars

Still, there was this headline awaiting my return: “Afghan lawmaker says relative killed after U.S. soldiers raided her home.” Sigh.

After nine years in which such stories have appeared with unceasing
regularity, I could have written the rest of it myself while on
vacation, more or less sight unseen. But here it is in a nutshell:
there was a U.S. night raid somewhere near the Afghan city of
Jalalabad. American forces (Special Operations forces, undoubtedly),
supposedly searching for a “Taliban facilitator,” came across a man
they claimed was armed in a country in which the unarmed man is
evidently like the proverbial needle in a haystack. They shot him
down. His name was Amanullah. He was a 30-year-old auto mechanic and
the father of five. As it happened, he was also the brother-in-law of
Safia Siddiqi, a sitting member of the Afghan Parliament. He had, as
she explained, called her in a panic, thinking that brigands were
attacking his home compound.

And
here was the nice touch for those U.S. Special Operations guys, who
seem to have learning abilities somewhat lower than those of a hungry
mouse in a maze when it comes to hearts-and-minds-style
counterinsurgency warfare. True, in this case they didn’t shoot two
pregnant mothers and a teenage girl, dig
the bullets out of the bodies, and claim they had stumbled across
“honor killings,” as Special Operations troops did in a village near
Gardez in eastern Afghanistan in March; nor did they handcuff seven schoolboys and a shepherd and execute them, as evidently happened in Kunar Province in late December 2009; nor had they shot a popular imam
in his car with his seven-year-old son in the backseat, as a passing
NATO convoy did in Kabul, the Afghan capital, back in January; nor had
they shadowed a three-vehicle convoy by helicopter on a road near the
city of Kandahar and killed 21 while wounding 13 via rocket fire, as U.S. Special Forces troops did in February. They didn’t wipe out a wedding party -- a common enough occurrence in our Afghan War -- or a funeral, or a baby-naming ceremony (as they did in Paktia Province, also in February), or shoot up any one of a number of cars, trucks, and buses loaded with innocent civilians at a checkpoint.

In
this case, they killed only one man, who was unfortunately -- from
their point of view -- reasonably well connected. Then, having shot
him, they reportedly forced the 15 inhabitants in his family compound
out, handcuffed and blindfolded
them (including the women and children), and here was that nice touch:
they sent in the dogs, animals considered unclean in Islamic society,
undoubtedly to sniff out explosives. Brilliant! "They disgraced our
pride and our religion by letting their dogs sniff the holy Koran, our
food, and the kitchen," Ms. Siddiqi said angrily. And then, the American military began to lie about what had happened, which is par for the course. After the angry legislator let them have it (“...no one in Afghanistan is safe -- not even parliamentarians and the president himself”) and the locals began to protest, blocking the main road out of Jalalabad and chanting “Death to America!,” they finally launched an investigation. Yawn.

If I had a few bucks for every “investigation” the U.S. military
launched in Iraq and Afghanistan over the years after some civilian or
set of civilians died under questionable circumstances, I might be on
vacation year around.

The U.S. military can, however, count on one crucial factor in its
repetitive war-making: kill some pregnant mothers, kill some
schoolboys, gun down a good Samaritan
with two children in his car trying to transport Iraqis wounded in an
Apache helicopter attack to a hospital, loose a whirlwind that results
in hundreds of thousands of deaths -- and still Americans at home
largely don’t care. After all, for all intents and purposes, it’s as
if some other country were doing this on another planet entirely, and
“for our safety” at that.

In that sense, the American public licenses its soldiers to kill
civilians repetitively in distant frontier wars. As a people -- with
the exception of relatively small numbers of Americans directly
connected to the hundreds of thousands of American troops abroad -- we
couldn’t be more detached from "our" wars. Repetition, schmepetition.
The real news is that Conan O’Brien “got very depressed at times” after
ceding “The Tonight Show” to Jay Leno (again) and that the interview
drove CBS’s “60 Minutes” to a ratings success.

The creation of the All-Volunteer Army in the 1970s was a direct
response to the way the draft and a citizen’s army undermined an
imperial war in Vietnam. When it came to paying attention to or caring
about such wars, it also turned out to mean an all-volunteer situation
domestically (and that, too, carries a price, though it’s been a hard
one for Americans to see).

“You’ll Never See It Coming”

I came back from vacation to several other headlines that I could have sworn I’d read before I left. Take, for instance, the Washington Postheadline: “Amid outrage over civilian deaths in Pakistan, CIA turns to smaller missiles.” So here’s the “good” news, according to the Post
piece: now we have a new missile weighing only 35 pounds, with the
diameter of “a coffee cup,” and “no bigger than a violin” -- who thinks
up these comparisons? -- charmingly named the Scorpion. It has been
developed to arm our drone aircraft and so aid the CIA’s air war
against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the Pakistani tribal borderlands.
According to the advocates of our drone wars,
the new missile has the enormous benefit of being so much more precise
than the 100-pound Hellfire missile that preceded it. It will, that
is, kill so much more precisely those we want killed, and so
(theoretically) not spark the sort of anti-American anger that often
makes our weaponry a rallying point for resistance.

Talk about repetitious. The idea that ever more efficient and “precise” wonder weapons
will solve human problems, and perhaps even decisively bring our wars
to an end, is older than... well, than I am anyway, and I’m almost 66.
After six-and-a-half decades on this planet and a week on vacation, I
know one thing, which I knew before I left town: there’s no learning
curve here at all.

Oh, and however crucial our night raids, and nifty our new weaponry, and despite the fact that we’re now filling the skies with new aircraft on new missions in our undeclared war in Pakistan, I returned to this headline in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes:
“Report: Still not enough troops for Afghanistan operations.” The
Pentagon had just released its latest predictable assessment of the
Afghan War, which included the information that, of the 121 districts
in the country that the U.S. military identifies as critical to the war
effort, NATO only has enough forces to operate in 48. (U.S. troop
strength in Afghanistan has nonetheless risen by 56,000 since President
Obama took office.) The news was grim: the Taliban remains on the
rise, controlling ever larger swaths of the countryside, and the
government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai is increasingly unpopular.
What you can already feel here is the rise of something else hideously
predictable -- the “need” for, and lobbying for, more American troops
-- even though the latest polling data indicate that Afghan anger and
opposition may be rising in areas U.S. troops are moving into.

Or what about this headline in the British Guardian that
a friend emailed me as I returned? “Afghanistan forces face four more
years of combat, warns NATO official.” Four more years! Doesn’t that
sound repetitiously familiar -- and not as a line for Obama’s
reelection campaign either. Think of all this as a kind of predictable
equation: more disastrous raids and offensives plus more precise
weapons for more attacks = the need for more troops plus more time to
bring the Afghan War to a “satisfactory” conclusion.

Oh, and let me mention one last repetitive moment. You may remember
that, in March 2004, just a year after he launched the invasion of
Iraq, President George W. Bush appeared at the annual black-tie dinner
of the Radio and Television Correspondents' Association and narrated a jokey slide show. It showed him looking under White House furniture and around corners for those weapons of mass destruction
that his administration had assured Americans would be found in Iraq in
profusion, and which, of course, were nowhere to be seen. "Those
weapons of mass destruction,” the president joked, “have got to be here
somewhere."

Hard to imagine such a second such moment, certainly not from the
joke writers of Barack Obama, who appeared at a White House
Correspondents' Association dinner while I was gone, and garnered this
positive headline
at the wonk Washington political website Politico.com for his sharp
one-liners: “Obama Tops Leno at WHCD.” The accompanying piece hailed
the president for showing off “his comedic chops” and cited several of
his quips to make the point. Here was one of them, quoted but not
commented on (nor even considered worth a mention in the main Washington Post piece on his appearance, though it was noted in a Post blog):
“The Jonas Brothers are here!... Sasha and Malia are huge fans but boys
don't get any ideas. I have two words for you: Predator Drones. You'll
never see it coming."

The audience at the correspondents’ dinner reportedly “laughed approvingly.” And why not?
Assassinate the Jonas brothers by remote control if they touch his
daughters? What father with access to drone killers wouldn’t be
tempted to make such a joke? We’re talking, of course, about the
weaponry now associated with what media pieces still laughably call
the CIA’s “covert war" or “covert missions” in Pakistan. So covert
that a quip about them openly slays the elite in Washington. Of
course, you might (or might not) wonder just how funny such a one-liner
might seem at a Pakistani media roast.

And I wonder as well just what possessed another American president
to do it again? Okay, it’s not an oil spill off the coast of planet
Earth or an actual air strike in some distant land, just a joke in a
nation that loves stand-up, even from its presidents. Still, I think
you'll have to admit that the repetition factor is eerie.

By the way, don’t mistake repetition for sameness. If you repeat
without learning, assessing, and changing, then things don’t stay the
same. They tend to get worse. The thought, for instance, that either
a giant oil company or the Pentagon will solve our problems is
certainly a repetitive one. So is the belief that, when they make a
mess, they should be in charge of "investigating" themselves and then
responding. While predictable, the results, however, do not simply
leave us in the same situation.

And don’t say you didn’t read it here: If American wars continue to
exist as if in a galaxy far, far away, and the repeats of the repeats
pile up, things will get worse (and, in the most practical
terms, life will be less safe). Once we’re all finally distracted from
the possibility of the Gulf of Mexico being turned into a dead sea by
the next 24/7 crisis, if nothing much changes, expect repeats. After
all, what happens when, in the “tough oil” era, the BPs of this world hit the melting Arctic with their deep water rigs in really bad climates?

In such circumstances, repetition doesn’t mean sameness; it means a
wrecked world. And here’s the worst of it: predictable as so much of
this may be, the odds are you’ll never see it coming.

May 03, 2010

On a winter’s day in Boston in 1773, a rally of thousands at Faneuil
Hall to protest a new British colonial tax levied on tea turned into an
iconic moment in the pre-history of the American Revolution. Some of
the demonstrators -- Sons of Liberty, they called themselves -- left
the hall and boarded the Dartmouth, a ship carrying tea, and dumped it overboard.

One of the oddest features of the Boston Tea Party, from which our
current crop of Tea Party populists draw their inspiration, is that a
number of those long-ago guerilla activists dressed up as Mohawk
Indians, venting their anger by emitting Indian war cries, and carrying
tomahawks to slice open the bags of tea. This masquerade captured a
fundamental ambivalence that has characterized populist risings ever
since. After all, if in late eighteenth century America, the Indian
already functioned as a symbol of an oppressed people and so proved
suitable for use by others who felt themselves put upon, it was also
the case that the ancestors of those Boston patriots had managed to
exterminate a goodly portion of the region’s Native American population
in pursuit of their own self-aggrandizement.

Today’s Tea Party movement, like so many of its “populist”
predecessors, is a house of contradiction, a bewildering network of
crosscutting political emotions, ideas, and institutions. What
connects it powerfully to a populist past stretching all the way back
to Boston Harbor is, however, a sense of violation: “Don’t Tread on
Me.”

Despite a recurring resistance to the impositions of powerful
outside forces -- anti-elitism has been axiomatic for all such
insurgencies -- populist movements have differed greatly on just what
those forces were and what needed to be done to free people from their
yoke. It’s worth noting, for instance, that an earlier invocation of
the Boston Tea Party took place at a 1973 rally on a replica of the Dartmouth -- a rally called to promote the impeachment of President Richard Nixon.

From the Know-Nothings to the People’s Party

Over the course of American history, the populist instinct, now
resurgent in the Tea Party movement, has oscillated between a desire to
transform, and so create a new order of things, and a desire to restore
a yearned-for (or imagined) old order.

Before the Civil War, one such movement that caught both these urges
was colloquially dubbed the “Know-Nothings” (not for any
anti-intellectualism, but because its members deliberately conducted
much of their business in secret -- hence, if questioned, were
instructed to say, “I know nothing”). Know-nothing-ism exuded the
desire to move forward and backward at the same time. During the 1840s
and 1850s, it swept across much of the country, North and South. There
were “know-nothing” candies, “know-nothing” toothpicks, and
“know-nothing” stagecoaches.

Soon enough, the movement evolved into a national political party,
the American Party, that appealed to small farmers, small businessmen,
and working people. Its attraction was two-fold. The party
vociferously opposed Irish and German Catholic immigration to the U.S.
(as well as that of Chinese and Chilean immigrants working in the gold
fields of California). Yet, in the North, it also denounced slavery.
As planks in a political program, nativism and anti-slavery
might seem like an odd couple, but in the minds of the party’s
followers they were joined at the hip. As Know-Nothings saw it, the
Papacy and the South’s slave-owning planter elite were both conspiring
to undermine a democratic society of masterless men.

Keep in mind that conspiratorial thinking has long been deeply
embedded in American populist movements (as in the Tea Party today).
In nineteenth century protestant America, alleged plots by Vatican
hierarchs were a recurrent feature of political life. In the North, a
wave of crime and the rise of “poor relief” and other forms of
dependency -- including wage labor, which accompanied the arrival of a
flood of impoverished Catholic immigrants -- seemed to threaten an
American promise of a society of free, equal, and self-reliant
individuals (supposedly so noxious to the priestly elite of the
Catholic Church). In the slave South, where the master class was
believed to be hard at work subverting the Constitution, conspiratorial
machinations were self-evidently afoot. By the mid-1850s, most
“Know-Nothings” in the North had found their way into the newborn
Republican Party which combined hostility to slavery with a milder form
of anti-Catholicism.

Populism
with a capital “P,” the great economic and political insurgency of the
last third of the nineteenth century that blanketed rural America from
the cotton South to the grain-growing Great Plains and the Rocky
Mountain West, would bear its own distinctive ambivalence. The
People’s Party indicted corporate and finance capitalism for destroying
the livelihoods and lives of independent farmers and handicraftsmen.
It also attacked big business for subverting the foundations of
democracy by capturing all three branches of government and
transforming them into coercive instruments of rule by a new
plutocracy. Populists sometimes attributed what they termed an
American “counterrevolution” to the conspiratorial plots of the “great
Devil Fish of Wall Street,” suspected of colluding with Great Britain’s
elite to undo the American Revolution.

The remedies proposed, however, were hardly those of Luddites.
These instead anticipated many of the fundamental reforms of the next
century, including government subsidies for farmers, the graduated
income tax, direct election of the Senate, the eight-hour day, and even
the public ownership of railroads and public utilities. A tragic
movement of the dispossessed, the Populists yearned to restore a
society of independent producers, a world without a proletariat and
without corporate trusts. Yet they also envisioned something new and
transformative, a “cooperative commonwealth” that would escape the
barbaric competitiveness and exploitation of free market capitalism.

The Great Plains of Resentment

For the next four decades, populism remained emphatically against
corporate capitalism and held on tightly to its resentment of powerful
outsiders as well as a penchant for conspiracy mongering. During the
1930s, however, the location of Conspiracy Central began to shift from
Wall Street and the City of London to Moscow -- and even New Deal
Washington. Anti-communism added a new ingredient to an already
roiling American politics of fear and paranoia, a toxic element which
still inflames the Tea Party imagination two decades after the Berlin
Wall was torn down.

During the 1936 presidential campaign, in the midst of the Great
Depression, three populist movements -- Louisiana Senator Huey Long’s
“Share Our Wealth” clubs, the Union for Social Justice formed by the
charismatic “radio priest” Father Charles E. Coughlin, and Francis
Townsend’s campaign for government pensions for the elderly --
coalesced, albeit briefly and uneasily, to form the Union Party. It
ran from the left against President Franklin Roosevelt, nominating as
its presidential candidate North Dakota Congressman William Lemke, a
one-time spokesman for radical farmers. (The vice-presidential
candidate was a labor lawyer from Boston.)

The Union Party expressed a broad dissatisfaction with the failure
of Roosevelt’s New Deal to relieve economic distress and injustice.
Senator Long, the latest in a long line of Southern populist
demagogues, had been decrying the power of land barons, “moneycrats,”
and big oil since his days as Louisiana’s governor. His “Share Our
Wealth” plan called for pensions and public education for all, as well
as confiscatory taxes on incomes over $1 million, a minimum wage, and
public works projects to give jobs to the unemployed. Townsend’s
scheme was designed to solve unemployment and the penury of old age by
offering monthly government pensions of $200, financed by taxes on
business, to everyone over the age of 60. Coughlin, an early supporter
of Roosevelt, trained his fire on finance capitalism, inveighing
against its usurious, unchristian “parasitism.”

But Long and especially Coughlin were at pains to distinguish their
form of radicalism from the collectivism and atheism of the Red
menace. Father Coughlin expressed support for labor unions and a just
wage. He was, however, an inveterate foe of the left-leaning United
Automobile Workers union, and roundly condemned the sit-down strikes
which spread like a prairie fire following Roosevelt’s triumphal
landslide victory in the 1936 presidential election, as workers across
the country occupied everything from auto plants to department stores
demanding union recognition.

Indeed, in his radio addresses and his newspaper, Social Justice, the
priest ranted about an incongruous conspiracy of Bolsheviks and bankers
whose aim was to betray America. He would eventually add a tincture of
anti-Semitism to his warnings about a Wall Street cabal. His growing
sympathy for Nazism was not so shocking. Fascism, after all, had its
roots in a European version of populism that conveyed a post-World War
I disgust with the selfishness and incompetence of cosmopolitan ruling
elites, a virulent racial nationalism, and a hatred of bankers and
especially Bolsheviks.

Followers of Long and Coughlin loathed big business and big
government, even though big government -- back then anyway -- was
taking on big business. For them, “Don’t Tread on Me” meant a defense
of local economies, traditional moral codes, and established ways of
life that seemed increasingly endangered by national corporations as
well as the state bureaucracies that began to proliferate under the New
Deal. Union Party campaign oratory was filled with references to the
“forgotten man,” an image first invoked by Roosevelt on behalf of the
working poor.

In the years ahead, kindred images would resurface during a time of
turmoil in the late 1960s in Nixon’s appeals to the “silent majority”
of “Middle America,” and more recently in the Tea Party’s wounded sense
of exclusion. “Forgotten man” populism conveyed the irate politics of
resentment of precariously positioned Americans against the organized
power blocs of modern industrial society: Big Business, Big Labor, and
Big Government.

Race, Resentment, and the Rise of Conservative Populism

Over the last half century populism has drifted steadily rightward,
becoming ever more restorationist and ever less transformative, ever
more anti-collectivist and ever less anti-capitalist. What were
subordinate themes in the older style populism -- religious orthodoxy,
national chauvinism, phobic racism, and the politics of fear and
paranoia -- have come to the fore in our time. At least in broad
terms, both the Barry Goldwater and the George Wallace insurgencies of
the 1960s displayed this trajectory.

Goldwater, the Arizona senator and 1964 Republican candidate for
president, an “insurgent”? Yes, if you keep in mind his condemnation
of the too-liberal elite running the Republican Party, who, in his
eyes, represented a clubby world of Ivy League bankers, corrupt
politicians, media lords, and “one-worlders.” Or consider the way he
flirted with the freakish John Birch Society (which called President
Dwight Eisenhower a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist Party”
and warned of a Red plot to weaken the minds of Americans by
fluoridating the water supply). Or the Senator’s alarming readiness to
threaten to push the nuclear button in defense of “freedom,” which
could be thought of as the Cold War version of “Don’t Tread on Me.”

Above all, Goldwater was the avatar of today’s politics of limited
government. In his opposition to civil rights legislation, he might be
called the original “tenther” -- that is, a serial quoter of the Tenth
Amendment to the Constitution, which reserves for the states all powers
not expressly granted to the Federal government, with which he
justified hamstringing all efforts by Washington to rectify social or
economic injustice. For Goldwater the outlawing of Jim Crow was an
infringement of constitutionally protected states’ rights. Moreover,
he was an inveterate enemy of all forms of collectivism, including of
course unions and the welfare state.

As the Goldwater opposition sank its grassroots into the lush soil
of the Sunbelt, its desire to restore an older order of things was
palpable. At a time when New Deal liberalism was the reigning
orthodoxy, the senator’s reactionary impulses seemed startlingly adrift
from the mainstream, and so strange indeed.

Goldwater's rebellious constituents were an oddly positioned band of
rebels. Unlike the declining middling sorts attracted to the Union
Party, they came mainly from a rising Sunbelt stratum, a new middle
class significantly nourished by the mushrooming military-industrial
complex: technicians and engineers, real-estate developers, middle
managers, and mid-level entrepreneurs who resented the intrusion of Big
Government while in fact being remarkably dependent on it.

They could be described as reactionary modernists for whom
liberalism had become the new communism. How shocking when this
Arizona “maverick” -- he deserved the label far more than John McCain
ever did (if he ever did) -- won the Republican nomination in a
knock-down brawl with the presidium, led by New York Governor Nelson
Rockefeller, that had run the party until then. Might the Tea Party
accomplish something similar today?

Think of Alabama Governor George Wallace as the other missing link
between the economic populism of yesteryear and the cultural populism
of the late twentieth century. He was all at once an anti-elitist, a
populist, a racist, a chauvinist, and a tribune of the politics of
revenge and resentment. “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow,
segregation forever”: a line spoken at his inauguration as governor in
1963 that would be his signature defiance of the civil rights
revolution and its alliance with the federal government. In no
uncertain terms, it signaled the militant racism of his bed-rock
supporters.

His appeal, however, ran far deeper than that. The whole tenor of
his politicking involved a down-home defense of blue-collar America.
Like Huey Long, he was sensitive to the economic predicament of his
lower-class constituents. As governor he favored expanded state
spending on education and public health, pay raises for school
teachers, and free textbooks. When he ran for president as a third
party candidate in 1968, he called for increases in social security and
Medicare. As late as 1972, Wallace increased retirement pensions and
unemployment compensation in Alabama.

Yet he championed the hard-hat American heartland by hailing its
ethos of hard work and what today would be known as “family values” far
more than by proposing concrete measures to assure its economic
well-being. Wallace railed against the know-it-all arrogance of
“pointy-headed” Washington bureaucrats, the indolence of “welfare
queens,” and the impiety, moral decadence, and disloyalty of privileged
long-haired, pot-smoking, anti-war college students.

Bellicose calls for law and order, states' rights, and a muscular
patriotism fueled the revanchist emotions that made Wallace into more
than a regional figure. When he ran in the Democratic primaries in
1964 (with the support of the John Birch Society and the White Citizens
Council), he won significant numbers of votes not only in the Deep
South, but in states like Indiana, Wisconsin, and Maryland, a sign of
the Southernization of American politics at a time when the spread of
NASCAR, country music, and the blues were Southernizing its culture as
well.

Wallace’s venture into third-party politics (on the predictably
named American Independent Party ticket) terrified the Democrats, who
feared the loss of part of their blue-collar base. He called Vice
President Hubert Humphrey, then running for president against Richard
Nixon, as well as Northern liberals generally, a “group of god-damned,
mealy-mouthed sissy-britches” -- shades of Senator Joe McCarthy and the
1950s -- and he promised to take the gloves off, if elected, and bomb
North Vietnam back to the Stone Age.

Wallace’s popularity revealed a possibility to Nixon and the
Republicans denied them since the end of Reconstruction: that, on the
road to an Electoral College victory, they might begin to develop a
“southern strategy.” In the meantime, his populist cry that there “was
not a dime’s worth of difference between the Democratic and Republican
parties” won him 10 million votes, 13.5% of the total and 46 votes in
the Electoral College. And remember this: a crowd of 20,000 attended a
Wallace rally in 1968 at a sold-out Madison Square Garden in New York
City.

Don’t Tread on My Taxes

So what does this episodic and checkered history of American populism have to do with the Tea Party?

As a start, the Tea Party movement reminds us that the moral
self-righteousness, sense of dispossession, anti-elitism, revanchist
patriotism, racial purity, and “Don’t Tread on Me” militancy that were
always at least a part of the populist admixture are alive and well.
For all the fantastical paranoia that often accompanies such emotional
stances, they speak to real experiences -- for some, of economic
anxiety, insecurity, and loss; for others, of deeper fears of personal,
cultural, political, or even national decline and moral disorientation.

Though such fears and feelings are, in part, legacies of the
corporate liberal order -- one of the dark sides of “progress” under
capitalism -- in this new populist moment, anti-capitalism itself
barely lingers on. Though outrage at the bank bailout did help propel
the Tea Party explosion, anti-big-business sentiment is now a pale
shadow of its former self, a muted sub-theme in the movement when
compared to the Wallace moment, not to mention those of Huey Long or
the Populists.

This is hardly surprising since, at least economically, capitalism
has, according to recent surveys of Tea Party membership, served many
of them reasonably well. Like Goldwater supporters of the 1960s, those
who identify with the Tea Party movement are generally wealthier than
the population as a whole, and more likely to be employed. They are
also apparently better educated, so their fondness for Sarah Palin’s
intellectual debilities may be more a case of resentment of bicoastal
cultural snobbery than eye-popping ignorance.

Alongside an exalted rhetoric about threats to liberty lies a sour,
narrow-minded defensiveness against any possible threat of income
redistribution that might creep into the body politic… and so into
their pockets. “Don’t Tread on Me,” once a rebel war cry, has morphed
into: “I’ve got mine. Don’t dare tax it.” The state, not the
corporation, is now the enemy of choice.

Tea Party populism should also be thought of as a kind of identity
politics of the right. Almost entirely white, and disproportionately
male and older, Tea Party advocates express a visceral anger at the
cultural and, to some extent, political eclipse of an America in which
people who looked and thought like them were dominant (an echo, in its
own way, of the anguish of the Know-Nothings). A black President, a
female Speaker of the House, and a gay head of the House Financial
Services Committee are evidently almost too much to bear. Though the
anti-immigration and Tea Party movements so far have remained largely
distinct (even if with growing ties), they share an emotional grammar:
the fear of displacement.

But identity politics aside, Tea Party anger reaches far beyond the
ranks of the modest Tea Party movement. It resonates with other
Americans who understandably feel that political and economic elites,
serving themselves at the expense of everyone else, have failed
Americans. The big question is just exactly how (or even if) that
private and personal rage gets transformed into moral and political
outrage. If the heirs of George Wallace and Barry Goldwater, or the
Sarah Palins of today, have their way, the outcome won’t be a tea
party.